Poetry

Your grandfather and I walk alike, each of us counting the brittle spaces in getting older. At the desk I explain I want to see my son, and I see you are now digits on a sheet. Black men in black—the brothers—make sure you obey the rules. It is like the times I had to…

When I saw her in her urban kitchen— thin and smart in her charity-shop green dress— a glass wall was between us polished spotless with some soft cloth of mistrust. All winter she’d lived up the hill in the gray house with the damp walls, the rains fading the fields. The snow— its ice-floe memories…

Then the Great Dane became an arrow of smoke in a wind pipe of smoke, so I had to burn the body. He’d always considered himself king of infinite dominions: king of the bone, king of the living room, king of the elevator, king of the field. The ashes I scattered in a park close…

in terms of design one box is colored orange the one you wanted always is and sits in the bathroom of anyone’s house cause that’s what she wants it’s choosing that wakes things up I wondered how long all that I needed and encountered here would come like a wave not the shake but the…

Everything recedes With such grand effort. A morsel On the winter palace floor. In the trees Up ahead, a light goes out, asleep In her summer arms. Hate is born As a monument to our inattention and the blind Greed of disbelief. Even the heroin addict has more Conviction, morbidly patient with his addiction. Work,…

It is so and so and not the dusty world who drops. It is their mother and not the dusty world who drops them. Why I imagine her so often empty-handed as houseboats’ distant lights rise and fall on the far ripples— I do not know. I know that darkness. Have stood on that bridge…

but don’t read this poem whose title implies I think you’re old but you are at least older than me time passing makes everyone old unless death and I don’t want that which is not to say I’m terrified but don’t not read this poem because you’ve died! I’d rather insult you what I mean…

César Vallejo, Arago Clinic, Paris, Holy Friday April 15, 1938 It was you, César, they killed to the base of your forefinger, you. Certainly they shot Pedro Rojas too. No doubt Juana Vasquez was killed. The killers, poor also, were skilled. And Emilio, they shot him, in the back of the neck, after they made…

for Sangchen Tsomo   Today it looks like a radiant darkness within the body and the sound of the dove in morning and evening and how the machine of my mind is never silent and how I pray for silence like a rain cloud combed through branches. Or the dove’s slow sound above last year’s…